I had an interesting experience with UPS - they shipped me a tape library from the U.S. to Canada... when it arrived, the inside was completely trashed. As in, no recognizable components bigger than a credit card. UPS insisted that the condition of the tape library was as they received it for shipment. Until I sent them a photograph of the puncture mark made by THEIR forklift, right through THEIR shipping documents...
From: "cctalk" <cctalk@classiccmp.org> To: "cctalk" <cctalk@classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2019 12:21:39 PM Subject: Re: Shipping from Europe to USA > On Aug 22, 2019, at 2:09 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> > wrote: > > > >> On Aug 22, 2019, at 2:57 PM, Peter Corlett via cctalk >> <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: >> >> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 06:30:10PM +0000, Henk Gooijen via cctalk wrote: >> ... >>> Only UPS did … and yes, the “horror” stories *are* true. They managed to >>> drop >>> the package. Not from 4 inches above ground, but more, because a *steel >>> corner* had a dent! >> >> Hence that old joke: "If being air dropped out of a C-130 into a minefield >> constitutes 'moderately rough handling', what constitutes 'very rough >> handling'?" "Being shipped UPS". > > I'm reminded of a legendary story from a long time ago, of a DEC disk being > air-shipped to a customer. RP03? Not sure, but something of that size class. > > The story was that the shipping company hadn't strapped it down properly, so > when the plane applied takeoff power, the drive slid backwards in the cargo > hold. Fast enough to exit the hold through the airplane skin, landing on the > runway with a nice bounce. > > The drive was taken back to Maynard, where it was observed that the corner of > the frame was badly bent. The techs propped it up on a cinder block and > turned the drive on; it worked fine. > > Sure sounds like a fairy tale, but it's a fun one. Friend who owned a larger regional ISP back in the day bought a new Ascend MAX. It shipped UPS and arrived with a perfect boot print on the side of the box. To this day we still make jokes about UPS playing soccer with the package. (Semi-related side story; A few months after installation, the Max started dropping calls on one line card. Ascend refused to RMA it because it passed diagnostics. They went back and forth over for a week or so until one day their sysadmin had enough; He calmly removed the card from the chassis and, with an Ascend tech on speakerphone, smashed the thing to bits with a hammer. “Oh, it just failed. Won’t pass diagnostics anymore.” He got his RMA number. The replacement card worked without issue for the next several years.)